For the Love of Books: Turkey versus Belgium

20Nov

The 80. edition of Antwerp Book Fair (Boekenbeurs) has finished recently. Shortly after that, another book fair, 35. Istanbul Book Fair took place. I was curious to compare the number of visitors, and especially the percentage of book fair visitors by taking the population of the city into account.

In other words, 3.7% of Istanbul visited their book fair, whereas 34% of Antwerp population visited their book fair. If 34% of Istanbul’s population visited the book fair, that would make ~ 5.1 million people in 9 days.

This picture tells us something about literacy and interest in books, but of course we should always ask the question: how representative such a crude statistic is? Another interesting fact is that Istanbul makes up about 20% of Turkey’s population, whereas Antwerp makes up about 4.5% of Belgium’s population. (If we want to compare Turkey to a country with similar population and its most populated city: Germany is close to Turkey with its 80 million people, and its most populated city, Berlin, is home to 3.4 million people. In other words, Germany’s most populated city makes up only 4.25% of the Germany’s population.)